Hello fellow consumers, As always thank you to everyone that participated in the last weekly and remember you are Operation MONKE!
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NOTE: Covid continues to be a interesting topic for us. Likely won't be the last time we cover it depending on how things playout. Good discussion ConPro.
This Weeks Discussion Theme: Consoom Inflooootion
In this weekly we consoom infloootion! As you may be aware many products, utilities, and services have risen in price. Consider the increased cost of gasoline which has caused many to budget differently. Even if you look at the inflation of currency the USD has inflated by ~8.5%. True this might not seem like that big of a deal if you consider that $100 in 2021 would be worth ~$106 today in 2022. However, inflation is something that creeps up over time. For example, $100 in 2000 would be worth ~$166 today. The goal of this weekly is to come up with and share strategies to mitigate the effects of inflation.
Discussion ideas:
- Have you noticed inflation throughout your life or are you only now starting to notice it?
- Is inflation the cause for the rising price of many things like gasoline? How related is this to COVID and Ukraine? Will prices return to “normal” soon?
- Share any ideas which you think might mitigate the effects of inflation in your life? E.g., budgeting advice, saving money, stocks, investing in commodities, cryptocurrencies, etc...
Weekly Polls:
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Open Response: Suggest weekly themes or provide some other suggestion NOTE: Thank you for the new suggestions! Keep the coming.
Prices have increased by 10-15%
Fuel has increased by a whopping 40% (Diesel is now more expensive than regular gasoline)
housing are still expensive as hell, the sole comfort is that they've finally axed the requirements for masks in closed spaces and we are slowly returning to the traditional office slavery we are all used to
other than that, it's shit as per usual
oh and don't forget next month is sodomy month, so if you have a female/jew mayor you're going to see sodomy flags plastered ALL OVER your city
Nice. The mayor's can ignore inflation for another month by distracting plebs with gay flags.
Lmao more of the same bread and circuses
Gas just jumped another 10 cents here yesterday. Fuck meeeeee
Prices have increased 100% for me.
Some anecdotal experiences:
A shopping cart full of groceries used to cost me about 150. Now its 250 for the same stuff.
Last summer I bought some lasko box fans for $20. Ebay, walmart, target, they were $18-20 everywhere. I bought one recently, same brand and model as before, 20in lasko box fax... $32!
Landlords in my city are demanding proof of income to become their tenant, and they all ask for 4x or more the monthly rent. Low end housing in the ghetto was $250-400 per bedroom for all my life, now I cant find anything under 700 per bedroom.
Chicken wings cost $8 for 5! Wtf! Not long ago you could order a dozen wings for $8 anywhere, then it was $10, then it was 10 wings, now its over a dollar per wing even if you get an order of 30.
Bottled water at the corner store more than doubled. Inflation somehow hit bottled water harder than any of the sodas or energy drinks.
Electricity costs are ridiculous these days. They used to be nearly unnoticeable. Now its a decent fraction of my overall bills.
Rent went up 8% over the winter.
What stayed the same:
Beer is the same price as always. Cheaper than all other drinks.
Produce only inflated at the grocery store, farmers markets still have good prices
My cell phone has been an unchanging $30/month for over 10 years
My wage didnt budge lol
As an older guy, there has always been a gradual inflation of prices as the economy grew. I remember spikes in gas, milk, etc. However, all of those combined can't equal what we are experiencing now. We are literally in a perfect storm. And the biggest factor that no one has even mentioned is social security. They will either have to increase payout to match inflation, or a bunch of elderly are going to starve. Either option is just more fuel on the fire of this giant collapse.
I’ve been told by a few older folks that they are sorry because they think by the time my generation is their age we will not get social security.
Social security is is a literal, textbook definition of a Ponzi scheme.
Yep I've never counted on it, and I'm never never going to count on a 401K or any other bullshit. I don't trust anything but me to handle my resources. Will I ever retire? I doubt it, but that's literally the least of my worries these days. As a zoomer I hope I get to live to retirement age at all.
Social Security could work if the fund invested in more than just US Treasuries. If they invested in US stocks and bonds, it would never go bankrupt. It needs to be treated like all other sovereign wealth funds and invested intelligently.
When do you think the SS crisis will hit?
We are already in the beginning of it. If the market keeps going down, which most analyst believe it will, it will wipe out the 401ks that most were relying on for their actual retirement. Couple that with surging food and gas prices, we will have millions of non workers who can no longer afford their homes. If the housing bubble pops again the market will be flooded with homes that have been greatly over valued that no one can afford to buy. Long story short everything that boomers have done for their entire lives very well could come crashing down around them, and drag everyone else down as well. I'm thinking things will began to further accelerate this fall after the harvests and foods prices continue to drive inflation. Housing trouble but spring/summer next year. This is the summer to prepare.
I'm envisioning a scenario with a bunch of extremely pissed off older people who have just lost everything they've spent their entire lives working for, with nothing left to live for and not much time left to do it. Now I wonder how many of them own guns...
Maybe 1 in a 100 million will have focused rage and actually know who is responsible. The rest will constantly spout pathetic "woe is mes" to anyone who will listen, or they will walk around fuming until they kill someone over a parking space. That's what's really coming when shit gets worse, random violence will increase. Do your food shopping in the early morning imo, like right when the store opens.
Yep, tend to agree. Maybe it will be more but whatever; doesn't have to be a lot.
Insert boomer meme with 7 boxes of unopened myPillow stuff , viagra, and car payments. They can afford a lot of stuff they’re just undisciplined. They’ll get bailed out somehow
There is no SS crisis, there is a medicare crisis. SS would work if it did not have medicare borrowing against it.
As an even older guy, this is just stagflation 2.0.
Imagine believing that inflation is 8% or whatever the news is saying since most things you buy have increased in price a lot more than 8%. Inflation is probably double what the news and government claim it is. There’s not a lot you can do to fight inflation other than own real estate according to people I talked to that lived through the 1970s and 1980s. I’m spending less money right now
Yeah I imagine it’s actually higher. 8.5% is what they are currently saying it is.
I like the site https://www.in2013dollars.com/ for checking USD inflation throughout time.
Another fun wan to look at is https://www.usdebtclock.org/
Beating inflation is really hard. But I’m starting to think investing in commodities like gold is actually worth it in the long run.
Are you suggesting that being a landlord is the way to go?
Unironically being a land Chad beats inflation according to the boomers I talked to. 2008 is the only time the land chads got wiped out
Land is selling like crazy where I live. A flat, buildable 2 acre lot that's perc'ed and has a well is selling for what a 4BR house sold for 5 years ago.
I left the USA knowing the economy would get worse. I'd like to hear input from others on this topic. It gives me credibility when i talk about politics the way i do and say i was right about the direction things were going.
I don't know when I'll return the USA but i know I'll have to eventually. Inflation hasn't hit me that hard. The corporate media wants to blame corporate greed yet the San Francisco Fed has said the CARES in 2020 has made the USA have inflation greater than that of other developed nations.
This inflation was obviously coming but I've done little to prepare other than moving. Wherever you guys are at well have it be outside the city.
Inflation first and foremost is due to the money supply. Heck the USA and NATO provoking Russia is due to the money supply. Having people not work is due to the money supply. So many issues are attributed to central banks.
buying land/houses is the best defense against inflation. Stonks and crypto are better than nothing but obviously have risks. But mainly when inflation is super high, everything sucks no matter what. Even the jews have a limit to how much inflation they can take before they get sick of it. I think the bigger concern is what's coming next, not so much the inflation happening now. I think there's going to be a serious regression in standard of living, culture, safety, and just about everything else. Gotta be ready.
Before shitpants took office I was saving at least $1000 every month after investments. For the past 6 months my balance is more or less staying even and I'm considering cutting back on investments particularly my IRA. Stocks, mutual funds and bonds are trash right now. Cryptos have dipped a ton but still higher than they were last summer and no one expected to see these prices again. %APY on staking certain coins is WAY higher than anything you'll find at a bank. Considering dumping the rest of my savings into tools but my garage is pretty much at capacity already, just no reason to have a ton of cash right now, it loses more and more value everyday and the shit you want to buy might not be available ever again.
Is staking coins safe though? From what I've been reading once you have a large enough amount of crypto to get decent returns from staking you should be taking it off the exchange to cold storage anyway. I've heard it's a huge risk for not enough reward.
I don't think it's any more unsafe than holding cryptos in general. I guess there are some exchanges that let you stake directly but typically you're staking from your wallet and it's definitely not for short term investments because the transfer and staking fees can take a while to recoup depending on how big your bag is.
Ok, I didn't know you could stake from a wallet. I have a Gemini account that has staking but generally the advice I've gotten is not to keep large amounts of crypto/money in there.
Staking itself is a feature of POS (Proof of Stake) blockchains, so that's the safest way to stake. Since exchanges is typically just a few big shared wallets, they too offer staking. They might even have most of their stash staked at all time anyway to earn profit from their users holdings, just like banks did back in the days when saving accounts was still a thing.
The main reason to avoid exchanges is because they're technically banks, i.e you keep your stash in someone else's wallet simply put. It adds an element of trust in a system that was designed to be trust less, which is pretty risky.
I was getting it confused with gemini earn which isn't even staking just lending them out while you assume all the risk. I think that was part of the whole meltdown, people were lending Luna at something like 19% return.
Probably good advice. If you're trading often you kind of need to leave it on the exchange. Both can get hacked but you may feel safer on one or the other depending on what you're doing.
I may leave some in there for small trades but mainly I'm trying to build up a stash, same as silver, treasury bonds, etc. Something has to come through eventually.
I bought a condo and took some, but not all, of my investments out right before the latest decline (so end of the year) This condo brings in an additional income stream and replaces my rent, so its like a net $1000 positive monthly. So because of that, my net worth should be increasing, right?
Well every time my net worth goes up from paychecks and rent checks, it goes right back down again from my remaining investments tanking, to the point where just staying even is tough.
Despite that, if I had cash now, it's probably still a good idea to be buying into the stock market at a discount. Just wish I was all cash before the downturn heh.
Some securities you could consider a bargain right now but I still have mutual funds that somehow never recovered after the 2008 crash so I'm a little hesitant to keep buying in. Cryptos I'm fairly confident have another run in them but it could be a while before we see that again.
Inflation Can bé used as a tool, it is now used against us, but there was a time where salaries were indexed on inflation, where every 2 months you'd have a proportional rise with the prices, that way it was easier to repay your house, the rich would get less rich, and the food was never scarce juste because of speculation, that was in the 50' to 70' in m'y country and we called that the Glory 30 until a bank loving président destroyed it all
Real estate near cities in the upper south has increased something like 20%, rural areas are around 12%. Appalachia has declined though. In retail costs it seems to be something like 20%. At sams we would get a 4 pack of lysol spray, now it's a 3 pack and the price is a couple of bucks higher. That's just one example of shrinkflation I have seen.
What to do about it? I don't know. Seek value. Easier said than done of course.
Higher costs means more cheap labor, and I had an uncomfortable thought yesterday. Illiterate Mexicans used to be the cheap labor, they've been replaced by illiterate central Americans who lack even the perfunctory white DNA of the former. When the Guatemalans are too expensive, who is next? Congolese?
chicken is the same price as sirloin steak here lmfao
The only acceptable strategy is to consume less. You don’t have to give up all your possessions and live in a pod, but half these answers here are talking about how slurpees and cereal have gone up 50% in price. Why are you even consuming that crap to begin with?
Jokes on these bastards, I've been avoiding as much consumption as possible, on all fronts.
Recently I noticed a lot of simple things going up by large percentages. Shit like canned pasta which was like 1 dollar and maybe 15 cents before went up to $1.50. Bananas and other fruit also keeps going up as well. It's a mess right now
If you are in an area where you can get a half cow or half hog, those prices haven't changed. Get some big chest freezers, hook them up to solar if you can and fill em.
The fatasses who eat nothing but cardboard food are losing their minds because that's gone up more than anything. Cereals and bags of chips have skyrocketed while the serving size has shrunk at the same time. I heard a guy screaming last week about his family size bag of chips being too small.
Haha, what a consooming chump. "My greasy salted air costs too much!"
The bargain bin DVDs at Walmart went up to $7.50 from $5. That was a big one that I noticed. Work boot prices went up too. My Thorogood boots were $70 cheaper not even 2 years ago.
I'm buying silver to hedge against inflation. Also, I'm making purchases more liberally if it's something that makes sense to buy now rather than later. I'm also only making debt payments towards loans accruing interest. Fuck paying the Fed student loans
Based.
Living with family I don't really notice inflation beyond seeing the gas prices at the local convenience store I go to. the soda fountain prices didn't increase, but the slurpee machine prices have. graphics card prices have come down but I'm not really in search of one. raspberry pi boards are still crazy expensive or out of stock.
I was working at a grocery store until recently and I saw theft go waaaaay up since fall of last year. I think Christmas made the problem worse because of people not paying attention to prices, buying gifts and then realizing afterwards that everything is too expensive to make their savings back. Theft has only gotten worse since Christmas and it's obviously not going to get better.
I went to Home Depot and Lowes over the weekend to pick up some tools. All of the power tools are caged up now behind lock and key. Motherfuckers were going in and just leaving with armfulls of them especially the batteries for cordless tools. Fucking crazy.
Doesn't matter if J-POW does QT or QE, we're screwed. I just wish the Government would consider stop spending way beyond its means.
It can't. It has to keep interest rates low.
20% of US public companies are zombies, meaning they have to borrow money just to service their debt.
Interest rates go up, they go out of business. That is Great Depression stuff.
Karl Denninger has had a number of good articles on inflation and supply chains this last week.
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=245844